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Here’s my response to the New York Times and Washington Post crowd-sourcing of Sarah Palin’s emails during her tenure as Alaska governor, via Matthew Boyle’s piece on the document dump:

The New York Times and the Washington Post issued open calls on Thursday asking their readers to help them “investigate” emails from Sarah Palin’s tenure as governor of Alaska. There was no indication of what this investigation was supposed to uncover.

Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin told The Daily Caller that the Times and the Post should just finally admit it: they are “left-wing organs.” Malkin wondered why these bold, new media-minded folks were not investigating the Obama administration.

“Where were all the crowd-sourcing champions at the New York Times and Washington Post when Democrats dumped the thousand-plus pages of the Obamacare and stimulus laws on the American people?” Malkin asked in an email to TheDC. “How about issuing an open call for collective public analysis of the nearly 1,400 recipients of HHS health care waivers? Or perhaps a project to pursue FOIA requests and reader information-gathering to probe Project Gunrunner?”

Malkin said calls for reader help with investigations that are critical of anyone on the left “ain’t gonna happen, of course,” at the Post or the Times. “So perhaps these left-wing organs should simply abandon all pretenses and form a progressive consortium with the Huffington Post and Daily Kos to officially unveil Operation Get Sarah,” Malkin said. “Then they can submit their joint application for the Pulitzer Prize in public-service journalism while mocking Palin for her thin skin.”

Now: Can you imagine if Fox News asked viewers to join them in a similar endeavor? Every journalism pooh-bah across the country would be caviling about the un-credentialed barbarians at the media gate.

Question: How do you become a journalist?

New York Times and Washington Post editors’ answer: By our invitation only.